THE WIZARD OF OZ: THE ORIGINAL WIZ

One cut of Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" has some words you've probably never heard before. And why is Garland crying? It's actually the reprise of "Over the Rainbow" that Dorothy sings as a prisoner of the Wicked Witch of the West; it was cut from the final edit. Even longer sequences were filmed, then eliminated, such as a lively song called "The Jitterbug" (which was released on the flip side of Garland's original commercial recording of "Over the Rainbow") and a sequence in which the Witch makes good on her threat to turn the Tin Woodman into a beehive. "Over the Rainbow" itself was nearly dropped, because Louis B. Mayer thought it slowed down the action too much and didn't like the idea of an MGM star singing in a barnyard. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Song.

The 48-page booklet that comes with these discs is filled with color photos, production storyboards, biographies, notes on all the music both used and deleted, and lots of stories. Did you know that Ray Bolger was first cast as the Tin Woodman and Buddy Ebsen as the Scarecrow before they switched roles? Ebsen, of course, never appeared in the film because he was hospitalized in an iron lung with aluminum-dust poisoning from his make-up. But he recorded his songs before he got sick. In fact, his voice remains on the final soundtrack in all the big group numbers. You can now hear him singing "If I Only Had a Heart." The other voice on this track belongs to Adriana Caselotti, who's even better known as the voice of Walt Disney's Snow White.

"Over the Rainbow" wasn't the only Oscar-winning music in The Wizard of Oz. The background music, by Herbert Stothart, won the Oscar for Best Original Scoring. And it's a pleasure to hear, not only because it conjures up vivid images from the film, but because it's so inventive and colorful in itself. Stothart is responsible for the music to a wide variety of films that includes Queen Christina, A Night at the Opera, and National Velvet. In Oz, he interweaves his arrangements of Arlen's tunes like Wagnerian leitmotifs, and he makes witty uses of folk songs, music by Mendelssohn and Schumann, and familiar songs like "The Whistler and His Dog." But his own original music is also memorable: think of the poppy field where Dorothy and her friends fall asleep, the ominous March of the Winkie Guards, or the music for mean Miss Gulch, whose bicycle turns into the Wicked Witch's broomstick in Dorothy's cyclone dream.

The Wizard of Oz is really a remarkable vindication of the entire studio system. The production suffered cast changes and script changes, and had at least five major directors, including King Vidor, who directed the "Over the Rainbow" sequence, though final credit was given only to Victor Fleming, who took over another MGM film that same year, Gone with the Wind. And yet out of all this chaos emerged a perfect cast, a perfect score, and a perfect balance of humor, magic, and menace, seamlessly edited. The Wizard of Oz lost the Best Picture Oscar to Gone with the Wind. But, of course, the Academy isn't always right.

Rhino has done Hollywood and all of us a wonderful service in its series of original movie soundtracks, which also includes Bernard Herrmann's magnificent complete score to Hitchcock's North by Northwest and an album of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney scores.

-- Lloyd Schwartz